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Prix
The Prix Ars Electronica Archive is a collection enabling search and viewing of all the submissions since 1987. The award-winning projects are documented with catalogue texts and audio-visual media. All other submissions can be searched by title/artist and displayed with year, category in list form. Please cite the credits (artwork name, artist and photographer) and only use the materials if your article is related to Ars Electronica.
Years
*Years* is a modified record player that reads a tree's year rings and outputs piano music. The tree's year rings are analyzed by a camera for their strength, thickness and rate of growth. This data serves as basis for a generative process that outputs piano music. It is mapped to a scale which is again defined by the overall appearance of the wood (ranging from dark to light and from strong texture to light texture). The foundation for the music is certainly found in the defined ruleset of programming and the hardware setup, but the data acquired from each tree interprets this rule-set very differently.
"The design object is at once material—an interactive sculpture—and immaterial, interpreting an inanimate 'fossil' into arguably the most abstract art form: music. Thus, the record player spans the natural, pre-analog world of time immemorial and the digital alchemy of transcribing visual data into sound, duly referencing an iconic analog medium as the bridge between the two worlds.
Meanwhile, the turntable mechanism is an ostensibly transparent input device: its periodic revolution is the direct basis of the musical playback, which corresponds to the aesthetic experience as it extends across time. [...] _Years_ reveals the disjuncture between a rotating disc and the coherent sounds that we hear for what it is: a man-made system designed to make sense of a naturally occurring pattern.
Of course, a turntable implicitly reveals and transcends the disparity between time as an objective quantity (the RPM of the record) and lived time (the internal time of music), whether the 'recording' is a vinyl disc or a slice of wood. This is doubly true of _Years_: by recasting the physical appearance of the rings and the familiar sound of piano keys, the work amplifies this distance while underscoring the relationship between the tangible and the aural." (Ray Hu for _Core77_, 2012)
Links: http://traubeck.com/years/
"The design object is at once material—an interactive sculpture—and immaterial, interpreting an inanimate 'fossil' into arguably the most abstract art form: music. Thus, the record player spans the natural, pre-analog world of time immemorial and the digital alchemy of transcribing visual data into sound, duly referencing an iconic analog medium as the bridge between the two worlds.
Meanwhile, the turntable mechanism is an ostensibly transparent input device: its periodic revolution is the direct basis of the musical playback, which corresponds to the aesthetic experience as it extends across time. [...] _Years_ reveals the disjuncture between a rotating disc and the coherent sounds that we hear for what it is: a man-made system designed to make sense of a naturally occurring pattern.
Of course, a turntable implicitly reveals and transcends the disparity between time as an objective quantity (the RPM of the record) and lived time (the internal time of music), whether the 'recording' is a vinyl disc or a slice of wood. This is doubly true of _Years_: by recasting the physical appearance of the rings and the familiar sound of piano keys, the work amplifies this distance while underscoring the relationship between the tangible and the aural." (Ray Hu for _Core77_, 2012)
Links: http://traubeck.com/years/
Actuator aned drive technician: Karla Spiluttini (AT)
**Bartholomäus Traubeck** (DE), born 1987, is a media artist. He lives and works in Linz (AT) and in Rotterdam (NL). He has a BA in multi-media art (FH Salzburg) and a Master in Visual Communications, University of Arts Linz. Since 2012 he has been studying Networked Media at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam.